Mission Editor TemplatesCreating accurate composition for unit groups like a Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) battery can be a bit complex and timely for new Mission builders. We recently added many new SAM templates to the Mission Editor that includes systems for the United States, Russia, Iran, and others.

This allows you to simply select a country and the SAM system, and place an entire battery with one mouse click.

Centaur IV Tank for DCS: World War II Assets PackOne of the next units to be added to the World War II assets pack will be the Centaur IV close support tank. Developed from the British Crusader tank, the Centaur possessed heavier armor and armament, along with higher speed and mobility. Its low profile and high speed made it particularly popular as a reconnaissance tank, although its vertical sided armor proved less effective than the thinner sloped armor of the Sheman. The name Centaur was given to the earliest A27 designs, powered by World War One-era Nuffield Liberty aero-engines. These proved badly underpowered.

During World War II Royal Marines fought for the first time in tanks. The tank was driven by a member of the Royal Artillery, but the guns were manned by the Royal Marines of the Armored Support Group. During the inter-war years and World War Two the Royal Marines developed much equipment for the purpose of amphibious warfare.

The Centaur IV was designed as a close support tank and armed with a 95 mm (3.74 in) howitzer (51 HE rounds in store). It was in service with the Royal Marines Armored Support Group and converted as “Hobbart’s funnies” with wading gear to get them ashore. Engine inlets and gun covers prevented any flooding. 114 were produced and soldiered on from D-Day to V-Day. The armor thickness on the front of the turret was 2.5 inches (63.5 mm). On the side and rear of the turret it was 2 inches (50.8 mm) thick. The vertical armor on the upper hull was 2.5 inches (63.5 mm) thick.

This week Baltic Dragon’s latest A-10C campaign was released that can be purchased here.

The Enemy Within 3.0 is a complete remake of the critically-acclaimed The Enemy Within campaign for the A-10C Warthog. This story-driven campaign puts you in cockpit of the Warthog as part of a small, 6-ship US detachment sent to Georgia. Your mission is to help contain a growing threat from a terrorist organization calling itself the “Caucasus Liberation Army” (CLA). As the story unfolds, you will be faced with a variety of challenges, including close air support, precision strikes, combat search and rescue, anti-ship strikes, and even air to air combat.

Striving to be as realistic as possible, the units featured in the campaign are based on their real-life counterparts. It also uses a sophisticated radio control system, meaning that you must tune your on-board radios to the correct frequency to hear the more than 2000 custom voice overs available throughout 21 missions.Compared to the original campaign, version 3.0 offers following great additions and changes:

20 out of 21 missions have been rewritten from scratch. This includes the course of action, dialogues, briefings and background information.

More than 2/3 of the missions take place in different locations than the original ones, and most feature different challenges and enemies to provide a completely new experience, 3 entirely new missions that are designed to complement and extend the storyline.

The 8 pilot and 3 commander characters featured throughout the campaign have almost 4x more custom voice overs (over 2100).

Additional documents and custom kneeboard pages are available for each sortie.

DCS: F/A-18C Hornet Update

Our Hornet team continues their hard work on the cockpit systems, sensors and weapons of the F/A-18C. The current focus is on:

Target of Opportunity (TOO) and Pre-Briefed (PB) HARM modes. Once complete, we will start work on the Litening II targeting pod for the Hornet; the ATFLIR will come at a later point in early access. Note that US Marine Corps Hornet’s operate the Litening II pod. However, this is not a simple copy and paste from the A-10C Litening II pod; this is still a significant amount of work, but it will allow us to bring a Hornet TGP into the game faster than the ATFLIR.

A huge amount of work is ongoing with the data link (D/L). This is probably the most complex system for the Hornet given the network sharing and new code that needs to be created. We are making good progress, and it will be a “game changer”. This will also address a new system of IFF in which locking an aircraft is no longer required to IFF interrogate it. The Hornet can operate on a D/L network and receive and correlate data from other Link-16 equipped aircraft (F/F) and surveillance aircraft like E-2 and E-3 AWACS (SURV).

In additional to cleaning up the DUD and fuze logic / pull-up cue and break X for HD bombs, progress has been quite rapid on JDAM and JSOW. Like D/L, this is also a rather complex task that will take time. Like HARM, these GPS-guided weapons have both TOO and pre-planned modes with many attack options.

Work is ongoing on the Latent Track While Scan (LTWS) and Track While Scan (TWS) air-to-air radar modes. This will in turn tie into the D/L.

We expect to see several of these items available this month.

New DCS World FeaturesAvailable now in the Open Beta and coming soon, are two new features for DCS World:

Wake Turbulence. Just like the wake behind a ship, an aircraft also produces a turbulence wake behind it, with the strongest forces coming off the wingtips as vortices. DCS World will now be modeling these as an option and will add a new level of realism and challenge when flying formations, aerial refueling, and air-to-air combat.

Battle Damage Assessment. Displayed along the left side of the screen when a target is damaged or destroyed by the player, these notifications appear. A red notification indicates a destroyed target and a yellow notification with a percentage indicates a damaged target. When in the cockpit, it can often be difficult to know if a target was hit and damaged. This optional feature is provided to remove that mystery.

DCS: MiG-19P Farmer UpdateThe MiG-19P was originally planned for a release in January, but after an extensive review of the MiG-19, we and RAZBAM have decided to postpone its release until a few items are resolved. These include some needed improvements to the flight model and documentation. It’s RAZBAM’s desire to release the MiG-19P in a finished state so it will need just a little more time in the oven to meet this expectation.